By Adam Rabiner
Kiss the Ground begins with an unnamed narrator intoning grimly about climate-change caused fires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters as news-real footage graphically illustrates these catastrophes. With six mass extinction events already underway, the bad news about our planet is overwhelming and the fear that we’re headed for a cliff puts most of us in a state of paralysis. After this proclamation, the camera alights on the narrator in a darkened studio, speaking into a microphone. “The truth is, I’ve given up…” the man says while grimly biting his lower lip. “…and the odds are so have you.” Then the camera cuts to the great outdoors, a picturesque forest and coastline in the background. “But what if there was another path?” The man is Woody Harrelson, and his message is anything but cheery.
The other path, which is the subject of Kiss the Ground, is restoring healthy soil which has the ability to sequester vast amounts of greenhouse gases which could balance the climate, replenish fresh water supplies, and feed the world. Kiss the Ground focuses on several key strategies of sequestration, the primary being regenerative agriculture. A proponent of this is Ray Archuleta who works for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). His job is to travel the country teaching ranchers, farmers, and other producers the basic scientific principles of soil. Most of his students do not know how soil works and have been practicing industrial scale agriculture for years so Ray discovers that educational and social issues precede ecological issues as he works to reduce chemical spraying and tilling which harm the soil and contribute to erosion.
Just as Ray seeks to convince farmers that they can still farm productively and profitably using no-till drilling and without pesticides and herbicides, Kiss the Ground, challenges another common misconception about modern day agriculture, such as the belief that methane burping cows are always bad for the environment. In another segment actor Ian Somerhalder visits Zimbabwean ecologist and livestock farmer Allan Savory who originated Holistic Management, a system of restoring parched African savannah to fertile and healthy grasslands through a controlled system of cattle grazing. Similar methods of soil preservation have been achieved by Doniga Markegard who uses the innovative, carbon-storing methods of regenerative ranching in the depleted San Francisco Bay Area.
But it is not just producers who can improve the soil. So can every-day consumers by carefully choosing what they eat. For example, a vegan or vegetarian has a smaller environmental footprint than a meat-eater. However, even a carnivore can lessen their impact, by choosing local, grassfed, animals rather than those mass-produced on feedlots. These points are highlighted by Gisele Bündchen and her husband Tom Brady who discuss their healthful eating habits.
And cities can get into the action as well. For example, San Francisco has an innovative composting program, that can be used as a national and international model, that penalizes restaurants and citizens for contributing to the waste stream but rewards them for diverting food waste into compost which is then given to local farmers.
One of the biggest successes featured in Kiss the Ground was the restoration, between 1994 and 2009, of China’s 140,000 square mile Loess Plateau. In this span a team of scientists worked with communities to turn a dusty and dry landscape to a verdant one supporting agriculture and lifted one hundred million people out of poverty. A place that had been completely devastated, through a lot of cooperation and hard work, had both its biodiversity and economy restored.
Yet counterbalancing these positive narratives are some hard facts cited that harken back to those early scary images of destruction. For example, we’ve lost one third of the world’s topsoil since the 1970s and two-thirds of the world is currently in the process of desertification which is causing forty million people to be pushed off their land every year. One estimate is that by 2050 there will be one billion soil desertification refugees. Perhaps the most dire and depressing statistic cited in the film is the doomsday estimate by the United Nations that the world’s remaining topsoil will be gone within sixty years. That is only sixty harvests left.
So, Kiss the Ground bounces between fatalism and optimism. But with its upbeat soundtrack by singer-songwriter and guitarist, Jason Mraz, it seems to ultimately take the side of hope. After all, between the two potential paths facing our small green planet, what choice, really do we have?
Kiss the Ground begins with an unnamed narrator intoning grimly about climate-change caused fires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters as news-real footage graphically illustrates these catastrophes. With six mass extinction events already underway, the bad news about our planet is overwhelming and the fear that we’re headed for a cliff puts most of us in a state of paralysis. After this proclamation, the camera alights on the narrator in a darkened studio, speaking into a microphone. “The truth is, I’ve given up…” the man says while grimly biting his lower lip. “…and the odds are so have you.” Then the camera cuts to the great outdoors, a picturesque forest and coastline in the background. “But what if there was another path?” The man is Woody Harrelson, and his message is anything but cheery.
The other path, which is the subject of Kiss the Ground, is restoring healthy soil which has the ability to sequester vast amounts of greenhouse gases which could balance the climate, replenish fresh water supplies, and feed the world. Kiss the Ground focuses on several key strategies of sequestration, the primary being regenerative agriculture. A proponent of this is Ray Archuleta who works for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). His job is to travel the country teaching ranchers, farmers, and other producers the basic scientific principles of soil. Most of his students do not know how soil works and have been practicing industrial scale agriculture for years so Ray discovers that educational and social issues precede ecological issues as he works to reduce chemical spraying and tilling which harm the soil and contribute to erosion.
Just as Ray seeks to convince farmers that they can still farm productively and profitably using no-till drilling and without pesticides and herbicides, Kiss the Ground, challenges another common misconception about modern day agriculture, such as the belief that methane burping cows are always bad for the environment. In another segment actor Ian Somerhalder visits Zimbabwean ecologist and livestock farmer Allan Savory who originated Holistic Management, a system of restoring parched African savannah to fertile and healthy grasslands through a controlled system of cattle grazing. Similar methods of soil preservation have been achieved by Doniga Markegard who uses the innovative, carbon-storing methods of regenerative ranching in the depleted San Francisco Bay Area.
But it is not just producers who can improve the soil. So can every-day consumers by carefully choosing what they eat. For example, a vegan or vegetarian has a smaller environmental footprint than a meat-eater. However, even a carnivore can lessen their impact, by choosing local, grassfed, animals rather than those mass-produced on feedlots. These points are highlighted by Gisele Bündchen and her husband Tom Brady who discuss their healthful eating habits.
And cities can get into the action as well. For example, San Francisco has an innovative composting program, that can be used as a national and international model, that penalizes restaurants and citizens for contributing to the waste stream but rewards them for diverting food waste into compost which is then given to local farmers.
One of the biggest successes featured in Kiss the Ground was the restoration, between 1994 and 2009, of China’s 140,000 square mile Loess Plateau. In this span a team of scientists worked with communities to turn a dusty and dry landscape to a verdant one supporting agriculture and lifted one hundred million people out of poverty. A place that had been completely devastated, through a lot of cooperation and hard work, had both its biodiversity and economy restored.
Yet counterbalancing these positive narratives are some hard facts cited that harken back to those early scary images of destruction. For example, we’ve lost one third of the world’s topsoil since the 1970s and two-thirds of the world is currently in the process of desertification which is causing forty million people to be pushed off their land every year. One estimate is that by 2050 there will be one billion soil desertification refugees. Perhaps the most dire and depressing statistic cited in the film is the doomsday estimate by the United Nations that the world’s remaining topsoil will be gone within sixty years. That is only sixty harvests left.
So, Kiss the Ground bounces between fatalism and optimism. But with its upbeat soundtrack by singer-songwriter and guitarist, Jason Mraz, it seems to ultimately take the side of hope. After all, between the two potential paths facing our small green planet, what choice, really do we have?